Thursday, 30 October 2014

Any plans I had for hacking the ScoutGuard came to an abrupt end recently when this happened:

Yes, I managed to not only lift the track off the PCB but also break the pin off the PIC. The camera was misbehaving quite badly before this incident anyway and I was getting close to calling it a day but this is one of those annoying mistakes that forced my hand. There is still sufficient track left to tap into, it is the minimal pin leg on the PIC that is the real issue.

Friday, 10 October 2014

This is something that I've been meaning to do for a while. I put together a "framework" to deal with the common tasks with the CurrentCost digital development boards, such as transmitting and pairing. I've also provided an example of handling a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor.

Tuesday, 7 October 2014

The plan for the forth instalment in this series was to extract the firmware from the flash, hack it around to remove the logo and write it back. This was going to provide the opportunity to play with the TSOP clip I'd finally got around to ordering, as well as a few other bits and pieces required to read from the chip in circuit.

Unfortunately there was a bit of down time while waiting on the clip to arrive. This was sufficient reason to justify poking around with the PIC16F684 chip that is used to read the sensor data and take the photo. I had probed the pins with the scope and could see the data coming in from the PIR and the trigger control going high after a certain amount of time and this data alone could have been useful to start playing about with. The temptation to look at the data from the chip was too great however, and I preceded to hook up my PICKit in an attempt to see if I could get a dump of the code. I knew the likelihood of this was pretty small, but nothing ventured nothing gained.

Sunday, 5 October 2014

Some time back, Billy gutted a USB scanner, so he could grab the fun parts like mirrors, steppers etc. He sent me the board with the sensor on it, in the vague hope I might be able to do something with it. Sadly, I didn't take a picture of the original board then. Initially, I looked over the board, and could identify the memory, the scanner USB chip, and the fact there was a linear CCD onboard. After figuring out there wasn't anything much I could do quickly, it sat on the side for a while. Eventually, I figured that I should do something with it, and if I was going to do anything with it, I'd need to figure out how to interface with the CCD. If nothing else, I figured this would be a good learning exercise.